The Sea Runners

ONE

A HIGH-NOSED cedar canoe, nimble as a sea-bird, atop a tumbling white ridge of ocean.

Carried nearer and nearer by the water’s determined sweep, the craft sleds across the curling crest of wave and begins to glide the surf toward the dark frame of this scene, a shore of black spruce forest. On a modern chart of the long, crumbled coastline south from the Gulf of Alaska toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca this particular landfall is written in as Arisankhana Island. None of the four voyagers bobbing to its shore here in a winter dusk of the year 1853, however, knows anything of this name, nor would it matter to their prospect if any did.

Now the canoemen as they alight. Karlsson and Melander and Wennberg and Braaf. More days than they wish to count they have been together in the slender canoe, dodging from one of this coast’s constant humps of forest-and-rock to the next. Each man of them afraid a number of times in these days; brave almost as often. Here at Arisankhana they land wetly, heft their slim but laden craft across the gravel beach into hiding within the salal and salmonberry.

Hope to Christ—the broad man, Wennberg, this—this’s drier than last night’s.

Oh, aye, and God send you wine and figs too, Wennberg?

Ought’ve left him, Melander. The one named Braaf, here. Ought’ve left him cooped in New Archangel.

The slender one of them, called Karlsson, stays silent.

They turn away to the abrupt timber. As the trees sieve them from sight, another white wave replaces the rolling hill of water by which the four were borne to this shore where they are selecting their night’s shelter, and where one of them is to die.

 • • • 

Their escape from New Archangel was of Melander’s making. In any day’s comings and goings at that far-north assemblage of hewn logs and Russian tenacity, Melander you would have spied early. Toplofty man with lanks of arms and high hips, so that he seemed to be all long sections and hinges. His line of jaw ran on as well, and so too his forehead; in the extent of Melander only the bright blue eyes and stub nose and short mouth neighbored closely, a sudden alert center of face amid the jaw-and-forehead expanse as if peering in wily surprise out of the hole of a tree trunk.

A strong right arm is the lever of life, these Russians say. You’d think by chance the Castle crowd might once put the lever to something other than hoisting a glass of champagne, aye? Early on, too, you would have come to know the jointed talk of the man, this Melander habit of interrupting himself to affirm whether he dared go on with so mesmerizing a line of conversation. All such reluctance to dazzle further notwithstanding, thirty-one times out of thirty Melander could be counted on for continuation. But no, lie around up there like seals they all do, yip-yipping down at the rest of us. . . . Luck for them that we were born, else they’d starve to death figuring out right boot from left foot. . . . To be Russian is to be a toothache to the world, aye?

Born on the isle of Gotland and thinking of himself as a Swede, Melander actually numbered in the landless nationality, that of the sea. Beyond memory his people on Gotland were fisherfolk, generation upon generation automatically capable with their reaping nets as if having happened into the world with hands shaped only for that task. So it came as a startling flex of independence when Melander, himself beginning to resemble a sizable height of pine spar, went off from his village of Slite to tall-masted vessels. Aboard ship he proved rapidly apt, the type of sea roamer of whom it was appraised that each drop of his blood was black Stockholm tar and his every hair a rope yarn. Ten or so years of sailing the Baltic and the North Sea bettered his position almost voyage by voyage, and then—Had I been born with brass on my corners, you’d one day be calling me Admiral, Melander half-joked to his deckhands the day he was made first mate.

Just such a billet, second in command of a schooner bearing twenty fresh seven-year men from Stockholm in the spring of 1851, was the one that shunted Melander to Alaska. Russian America, that world-topping wilderness yet was known as, its wholesale purchase by the United States—and consequent rechristening of New Archangel to what the coast’s natives knew this vital speck of site as, Sitka—waiting a decade and a half into the future.

Although he had no farthest thought of new endeavor at the onset of that voyage, a pair of outlooks swerved Melander into staying on at New Archangel. The first loomed square ahead—the eleven-month expanse of return voyage in the company of the schooner’s captain, a fidgety little circle-faced Finn who was veteran in the Baltic trade but had proved to be quite literally out of his depth on the ocean. The other lay sidewise to Mister First Mate Melander’s scrutiny, berthed there against a backdrop of Alaskan forest the spring morning when he reached final exasperation with his dim captain: The Russian-American Company’s steamship, the Emperor Nicholas I.

In a time and place earlier, Melander would have been the fellow you wanted to set a spire on a cathedral; in a later, to oversee a fleet of mail planes. But on an April day in 1851 at one of the rim ends of the known world, what sat at hand was this squatty wonder of self-propulsion. This, and a proclaimed shortage of gifted seamen in these northern Pacific waters which the fur-trading Russians historically had navigated, pre-Nicholas and pre-Melander, like men lurching across ice.

If the wind were clever enough, Melander observed to the baffled Finnish skipper upon taking leave of him, it ought to snuff out these steamsnorters before they get a start, aye?

Melander maybe under different policy would have gone on to earn his way up the ranks of the Russian-American Company at New Archangel like a lithe boy up a schooner’s rigging; become a valued promyshlennik, harvester of pelts, for the tsar’s Alaskan enterprise in the manner, say, of occasional young Scotsmen of promise who, along the adjoining fur frontier of northmost North America, were let to fashion themselves into field captains of the Hudson’s Bay Company by learning to lead brigades of trappers and traders, keep the native tribes cowed or in collaboration, deliver a reliable profit season upon season to London; and, not incidentally, to hold those far spans of map not only in the name of their corporate employers but for the British crown, which underlay the company’s charter terms like an ornate watermark. Simpson, McLoughlin, Douglas, Campbell, Rae, others: Caledonians who whittled system into the wilderness, names known even yet as this continent’s northern roster of men of enterprise and empire. But maybe is only maybe, and the facts enough are that on the broad map of mid-nineteenth-century empires Alaska lies apart from the Hudson’s Bay span of Canadian dominion. (It was but natural, the magistrate of America’s frontier history, H. H. Bancroft, would aver, in the gigantic robbery of half a world, that Russia should have a share; and had she been quicker about it, the belt might as well have been continued to Greenland and Iceland.) That, indeed, this colossal crude crown of northwestmost wilderness is tipped sharply, as if in deliberate spurn, away from London to the direction of Siberia and St. Petersburg. That within the tsar’s particular system of empire-by-proxy, Swedes and other outlanders who signed on with the Russian-American Company’s fur-gathering enterprise did so as indentured laborers, seven-year men. And that the name Melander thus is not to be discovered anywhere among the frontier baronage.

For as will happen, Melander after pledging to the Russian-American Company did find his life altered by the alluring new nautical machinery, right enough. But not in the direction hoped. Only seldom the Russians fired up the Nicholas, whose boilers proved to require approximately two days of woodchopping for each day of voyage—a visiting Hudson’s Bay officer once amended the vessel’s name to Old Nick, on the ground that it consumed fuel at the rate you might expect of Hell—and on the occasions when its paddle-wheels were set into ponderous thwacking motion, positions aboard were snatched by bored officers of the small Russian navy contingent stationed at New Archangel. Melander’s service aboard the Nicholas occurred only whenever the Russian governor, Rosenberg, took his official retinue on an outing to the hot springs at Ozherskoi, an outpost south a dozen miles down Sitka Sound. In Melander’s first Alaskan year this happened precisely twice, and his sea-time-under-steam totaled six days.

The rest of his workspan? A Russian overseer conferred assignment on Melander as promptly as the supply schooner vanished over the horizon on the voyage back to Stockholm and Kronstadt. Friend sailor, the overseer began, we are going to give you a chance to dry out your bones a bit, and Melander knew that what followed was not going to be good. Because of his ability of handling men and, from time on the Baltic, his tongue’s capability with a bit of Russian—and his Gotland knowledge of fish—henceforth Melander was in charge of the crew that salted catches of salmon and herring for New Archangel’s winter larder.

Seven-year men. The Russians’ hornless oxen, as Melander more than once grumbled it.

 • • • 

Deacon Step-and-a-Half is at it again.

Melander peered with interest along the cardplayers and conversationalists in the workmen’s barracks to see where the gibe had flown from. A fresh turn of tongue was all too rare in New Archangel. Melander himself had just tried out his latest declaration to no one in particular: A seven-year man is a bladeless knife without a handle. That had attracted him the anonymous dart, not nearly the first to bounce off his seaman’s hide.

These shipmates—Melander corrected himself: barrackmates—were an everysided lot. Finns and Swedes under this roof, about all they could count in common were their term of indentureship and the conviction that they were sounder souls than the Russian work force in the several neighboring dwellings. The Scandinavians after all had been pulled here. Most of the Russian laborers simply were shoved; stuffed aboard ship at Okhotsk on the coast of Siberia and pitched across the North Pacific to the tsar’s Alaskan fur field. Be it said, these Siberian vagabonds had not been encouraged onward to Russian America for habits such as nudging ducks into puddles. Thugs, thieves, hopeless sots, no few murderers, the flotsam of any vast frontier, jostled among them. (Where, an appalled governor of New Archangel once wrote home to a grandee of the Russian-American Company, do you get such men?) But so did debtors, escaped serfs, those whose only instinct was to drift. Melander, by now no admirer of anything Russian, saved his contempt for the New Archangel officialdom. These others, the Okhotskans, simply had made humankind’s usual blunder, forgot to get themselves highborn.

As for this crew in evening dawdle all around him, they nested here idle as— Abruptly Melander stood up, a process like staves suddenly framing themselves together into a very large scarecrow. Amid a card game several bunks away a shipwright from Karlskrona flicked a nervous glimpse his way.

Grinning at so easy a giveaway, Melander awarded a mocking nod to his derider and in galumphing strides went from the barracks. Outside held another sort of confinement, but at least airier than in. Melander as ever glanced up, the way he might have checked a topgallant sail, at the peak that thrust over all their lives at New Archangel, ungainly Verstovia. Its summit a triangle of rough rock atop a vaster triangle of forested slope, Verstovia presided up there broad and becrowned, the first presence each morning, the last at every dusk. And farther, snowier crags attended Verstovia on both sides. A threefold Jericho, this place New Archangel, walled first by the stockade, next by these tremendous mountains, and last, the distances to anywhere else of the world.

Odd, the deceit of distance. How it was that men would brave the miles to a new place, the very total of those miles seeming to promise a higher life than the old, and then find the work dull, the wage never quite totting up to what it should, the food worse than ever—the longing to be elsewhere now pivoted straight around. Yes, that was the way for a seven-year man, distance played these tricks as if a spyglass had spun end-for-end in his hands.

Melander moved off toward the central street of the settlement and encountered one of the company clerks, no doubt on his way to the governor’s hill garden. Many of the Castle Russians strolled such a constitutional at evening, any custom of home being paced through more devoutly here than in Muscovy itself. Melander considered that the man was wasting footsteps. More than beds of pansies and fuchsias were required to sweeten the soul of any Russian. Nonetheless—

Drostia, the lanky Swede offered with a civil nod and was greeted in turn. Perhaps a Melander could not rise at New Archangel, but at least he could invest some care to stay level.

This was one of the lengthening evenings of summer of 1852, the moment of year when darkness seemed not to care to come and New Archangel’s dusk took advantage to dawdle on and on. Before the season turned, eventide would stretch until close onto midnight. The long light copied Swedish summer. Which meant that while this slow vesper of the Alaskan day was the time Melander liked best, it also cast all the remindful shadows of what he had become absented from. His birthland. The sea. And his chosen livelihood. Triple tines of exile. Much to be prodded by.

Only because the route afforded the most distance for his restless boots, Melander roved on west through the narrow shoreline crescent of settlement. Past log building after log building, bakery, joinery, warehouses, officers’ quarters, smithy; if bulk of timbering were the standard of civilization, New Archangel could have preened grand as Stockholm. Sea drifter he was, Melander had never got used to this hefty clamped into-the-wilderness feel of the port town. Log barns and sawdust heads, the style of Russian America was summed by Melander.

In about four hundred paces from his barracks departure Melander’s traipse necessarily ended, the high timbered stockade with its closed sally port here stoppering New Archangel until morning.

Melander still needed motion. And so changed course to the north. Rapidly passed the gate watchman yawning within his hut. Climbed the short knoll where the first of the stockade’s blockhouses overlooked the gate. In long pulls clambered up the ladder to the catwalk beside the blockhouse. Here met the quizzing glance of the Russian sentry and muttered: The damned Finns are singing in the barracks again. They sound like death arguing with the devil.

The sentry nodded in pitying savvy and returned to his watching slot within the timbered tower. Melander was left solitary, scanning out beyond Sitka Sound and its dark-treed islands schooled like furry whales to the threadline of horizon that is the Pacific.

A time of studying seaward. The ports of all the planet were out there. Danzig and Copenhagen, Kronstadt, Trondheim, Rotterdam, London . . . Men and women are hard ore, we do not go to slag in a mere few seasons of forge: Melander aland was yet Melander, First Mate.

A raven flapped past, pulled a glance from the tall man. These black birds ruled the roofs of New Archangel and their metallic comment up there somehow struck an odd humility into a person.

Finally, as if at last reassured that the water portion of the world still hung in place, Melander dropped his gaze. Now was peering directly down at the edge of shore subjacent to the outside end of the stockade.

Here his looking held for a good while.

Eventually, the tall man murmured something. Something so softly said that the sentry nearby in the blockhouse mistook the sound for another mutter against twittering Finns.

It was not that, though. This:

Maybe not bladeless.

Do such things have a single first moment? If so, just here Melander begins to depart from a further half-dozen years of the salting of fish.

 • • • 

Take our swig outside the stockade, whyn’t we? The farther you can ever get from these Russians, the better anything tastes. Aye?

Tin mugs of tea in hand, Melander and Karlsson passed the sentry at the opened gateway of the stockade and sauntered to the edge of the native village which extended in a single-file march of dwellings far along the shoreline. In front of the two Swedes now stretched Japonski, biggest of the islands schooled thick in Sitka Sound. The channel across to Japonski was just four hundred yards or so, but one of the quirks of New Archangel’s spot in the world was that this moatlike side of water somehow emphasized isolation more than the open spans of the bay.

This Karlsson was a part-time bear milker. That is to say, ordinarily he worked as an axman in the timber-felling crew, but also had sufficiently skilled himself as a woodsman that he was sent with the hunting party which occasionally forayed out to help provision New Archangel—to milk the bears, as it was jested. The sort with nothing much he cared to put to voice and of whom even less was remarked, Karlsson. It is told that at a Scandinavian free-for-all, Danes will be the ones dancing and laughing, Norwegians endeavoring to start a fight, Finns passing bottles, and Swedes standing along the wall waiting to be introduced. Melander constituted a towering exception to this slander, but Karlsson, narrow bland face like that of a village parson, would have been there among the wall props.

They say it’ll be rice kasha for noon again. A true Russian feast they’re setting us these days, anything you want so long as it’s gruel, aye?

Seems so, answered Karlsson.

Sociability was nothing that Melander sought out of Karlsson. A time, he had noticed Karlsson canoeing in across Sitka Sound here, back from a day’s hunting. Karlsson’s thrifty strokes went beyond steady. Tireless, in a neat-handed, workaday fashion. The regularity of a small millwheel, Melander had been put in mind of as he watched Karlsson paddle.

What brought down Melander’s decision in favor of Karlsson, however, was a feather of instant remembered from shipboard. Karlsson had been borne to Alaska on the same schooner as Melander, and Melander recalled that just before sailing when others of the indentured group, the torsion of their journey-to-come tremendous in them at the moment, were talking large of the bright success ahead, what adventure the frontier life would furnish and how swiftly and with what staggering profit their seven years of contract with the Russians would pass, Karlsson had listened, given a small mirthless smile and a single shake of his head, and moved off along the deck by himself. Whatever directed Karlsson to Alaska, it had not been a false northern sun over his future.

I don’t see why that water doesn’t pucker them blue. They must have skins like seals with the hair off.

As Melander and Karlsson stood and sipped, a dozen natives had emerged from one of the nearest longhouses, men and women together and all naked, and waded casually into the channel